Dana Schutz: Young in the Future

Dana Schutz (born 1976) declared her painterly intentions from early in her work, and the fecundity of her visual world has not diminished over the decade-long course of her career, which has seen her work acquired by major museums across the world. Her paintings have always been characterized by bright, almost throwaway cartoonish colors that seem cheery in all but content. Once described as possessing a “careless cruelty,” Schutz's art plunges into dark fantasy realms to dredge up such images as face-eating heads, self-mutilators, child suicides, persons maimed, blindfolded or bound in terrible ways — all parading before the viewer in a genial palette that would be ideally suited to the depicting of a happy spring day. Schutz qualifies that, while her subjects are frequently self-devouring, they are “self-created too [...] They are defined by their own production.” This paperback monograph surveys work from her debut in 2002 to 2010.